High winds and glorious countryside...

...and chanting monks in a great abbey church of austere grandeur...the FAITH Movement has been holding  its annual Symposium all this week at Ampleforth Abbey,and it has been splendid.  We had an excellent series of lectures exploring St John Paul's Man and Woman he created them...I had not known that this was a lengthy book on which he worked during the years that he was Archbishop of Krakow. When he became Pope, he used the material for Papal lectures over a period of several months. These were interrupted by the assassination attempt in 1981 but later continued and were published and popularised under the title of Theology of the Body. But the full importance of this work is only now beginning to be realised.

The subject would at any time have been a significant and useful one for the Church. But in this as in so much else Karol Wojtyla had a prophetic understanding of the "signs of the times".   Campaigners in Western nations  who have for years have been successfully promoting  forms of sexual crudity, celebration of abortion, and abandonment of any authentically human understanding of marriage, are now going through a period of almost complete intellectual meltdown in attempting to ban any acceptance of differences between male and female. St JP's timely work opens up precisely the insights the Church needs...and his courage will be an example to us as we take this forward...

Ampleforth is a grand place in which to meet and pray. There is a sense of everything taking place within the enduring round of the monastic hours...I didn't rise in the dark to join them in the early offices of Matins and Lauds...but it was wonderful to be gathering in the great church as the bell rang out for Mass. There is a great sense of the "Mass of all the ages", a sense of time and history, of the long years of Christianity in our country and of being part of the Church around the world and in the next world too...

We had another chapel for our own use, but one night I joined the monks at Compline...a sense of strength in the darkened church with wind roaring outside...